The Outfit
What not to wear.
I've had meatballs with better bite
But no matter how many silly quips J.D., Tommy or Deuce utter to lighten the mood, the entire game's core reason for being - the combat - is never as gratifying as you feel it ought to be, and at least part of that is to do with the way Relic makes death a minor inconvenience. By removing the threat of death or of running out of ammo, you're constantly encouraged to be gung-ho, to take silly risks, to expose yourself to enemy fire, because it never matters. And even when you have been shot repeatedly, you can always retreat and recharge, or - at worst - respawn and mop up the stragglers with a full complement of drones in tow. There's no sense of tension, no feeling of achievement, just of having completed another linear romp where you get to do the same thing over and over.
Having said all that, even if The Outfit didn't adopt the utterly forgiving mechanics it does, the process of actually killing and destroying never feels that satisfying anyway, thanks to a combination of exceptionally dim-witted enemy AI (one behaviour mode: chaaaaaaarrrrrrge!) and the inability to approach the battle in a vaguely normal way. For example, you'd imagine that cover points would come into the equation, but they never do, and you'd also expect splash damage to be a useful ally, but no. Unless you're absolutely bang on with your bazooka or tank shells your enemies barely flinch.
And let's not even talk about the driving shall we? Oh ok then. So demented is the camera system when you're in control of a vehicle, you'd swear Relic was trying to annoy the hell out of you. It's not just vaguely broken; more often than not it's completely counter-intuitive to the point where you regularly find yourself driving up sheer rock faces, or doing ridiculous things that get you into all sorts of trouble - things that mainly involve not actually being able to see anything and not being able to do much about it. If it weren't for the ability to respawn, such issues would be magnified tenfold, but as it is, dying ten, 15, 30 times in a level (lasting less than an hour) just becomes the norm for The Outfit. You die, you respawn, you move on, but it just feels like a procession, and an utterly repetitive one that stays basically the same from the first level through to the last.
Even the Gamerscore achievements are daft, never rewarding careful play or genuine moments of skill, but dishing out 20 points for doing something completely arbitrary, like shooting 25 barrels or sinking 3 ships on the horizon - things that are incredibly easy in the wider context of your actions. Sometimes you'll even miss out on your achievement points because you weren't expecting the level to finish, which is a minor point, but an annoyance, nevertheless.
A Relic from the past
It doesn't help, either, that The Outfit is so unremarkably functional from a technical standpoint. Apart from the increase in resolution, there's little going on that Digital Anvil's Brute Force wasn't doing back in 2003 - a game that most of us have long forgotten about, but feels similar in many respects. Sure, the French countryside certainly looks pretty enough, the tanks and vehicles are nicely detailed and the ability to raze virtually everything to the ground is a nice touch, but the character models are entirely unremarkable, move unconvincingly (often lacking transitional animation), the standard of texture detail varies dramatically and the whole spectacle is totally let down by some noticeable pop-up, and shadows that literally draw on the screen as you're walking along - ten feet in front of you. It's certainly not a game you'll be showing off to your mates to convince them of the merits of the 360.
While we're talking technical merits, the audio's nothing to write a postcard home about either, with predictably dumb one-liners (that repeat endlessly), a generic, crunchy guitar-driven score replete with sweeping strings and parping brass in all the right places and standard sound effects. The game might have been rescued somewhat by an entertaining storyline, but as hard as it tries, all it does it ram home the point about how goddamn WARSOME the Americans were in their war effort. Sure, it's meant to be a spoof, but it's basically stereotype central, but without the script, voice or writing talent to endear you to these beefcakes and yet more by-the-numbers Nazi bad guys. Haven't we covered this subject 478 times already? Can we move on now? Good.
Predictably, things improve a notch in the multiplayer side of the game (be it split-screen, system link or online - the latter two for up to eight players), although we routinely had technical problems connecting to games and general issues finding many people playing it (even though the game launched in the US three days ahead). And when we did find people to play, most of them immediately added us to their friends list in desperation ("please stay!").
FU too
Co-op modes basically lets you play any of the game's 12 missions with one pal, meaning you have a theoretically easier ride getting through the various hot spots. With double the soldiers to take out the enemy it feels more like a proper army effort, but in truth it still feels largely identical to the single-player mode, albeit with someone else profiting from kills rather than you. This, in itself, makes it harder to clock up enough FUs to buy as much gear as you would normally, but overall it the greater numbers balance this issue out.
Elsewhere you've got basic deathmatch, Destruction (based around most FUs at the end of the round) and Strategic Victory, an assault variant that involve capturing your opponent's Command Point on the map before they do. Certainly the latter removes the stupidity of the computer AI from the equation, and with the whole premise of respawning fitting so much better within the boundaries of multiplayer, it's a far more coherent game because of it.
The 12 maps work well within the context of these modes, and with the right players with the right strategic sense, some really intense battles ensue. In fact, with all things considered the single-player campaign feels almost like an afterthought; perhaps it was, in which case, bad move, Relic, because as good fun as the multiplayer is for a while, it's by no means anything dramatically special, and not worth the entry fee on its own.
The Outfit never has any pretensions to be a serious war game, and that's fine. We're certainly not knocking it for being light-hearted or abandoning the basic rules and principles that constitute the really great games of the past. No, we can live with infinite lives, endless ammo and improbable resources, and for some of the time Relic's shooter feels fun in a mindless kind of way. But what we can't get past is how ordinary the combat feels, the distinct lack of tension throughout, the constant repetition and one-track lack of variety. And as much as the multiplayer is better, you're still hamstrung by uninspired combat, not to mention the game's all-round lack of technical impressiveness. The unavoidable bottom line is that The Outfit is one of the weakest games yet released on the 360, and we'd strongly suggest you try it for size before you go parading it around.